When many people begin exploring expanded states of awareness they are often plagued with self-doubt. That hasn’t been my problem.

My first out of body experience was so convincing and so consistent in detail that it pretty much removed doubt from mind. Since then I have operated under the principle that reality is the experience of the Self.

I know and trust my experiences as my experiences whether they occur in physical or nonphysical reality. If I’m alone at home and I spill coffee on the kitchen table I know it happened. I can clean up the mess and remove all the evidence, but I’ll still know it happened even if no else was there to confirm it. For me experiences in nonphysical reality possess a consistency of detail and context that feel as real as those in physical reality. Thus having a chat with a nonphysical spirit guide feels very similar to having a chat with a friend in a coffee shop. I don’t need my friend or my spirit guide to confirm my experiences. I know they’ve happened.

Still internal confirmation is different from external confirmation. What many people mean when they say “how do you know this is real?” is actually “how well do your experiences corroborate with external events that can be verified by others?”

The answer is: surprisingly well. Let me give you a few examples from across the years.

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The secret to experiencing states of expanded awareness is something that children know intuitively. A select few adults know it too, especially around Christmas. The secret is:

Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.

[I WROTE FOLLOWING ARTICLE FOR A DISCUSSION ABOUT DREAMS. I’M POSTING IT HERE WITH A NEW TITLE SINCE IT DISCUSSES MANY ASPECTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS THAT APPLY TO TOPICS ON THIS SITE.]

Dreams have long been considered a doorway to other levels of consciousness. But what is consciousness anyway?

The nature of consciousness has been debated by philosophers, scientists, and great thinkers for thousands of years. In that time countless definitions and divisions have been advanced, rejected, and rediscovered.

Awareness = Reality

For simplistic purposes, let’s consider consciousness to be a state of awareness of our inner feelings and thoughts, as well as the environment we perceive around us. Our consciousness changes constantly in response to new external stimuli or to shifts in our feelings or thoughts. Sometimes those changes are subtle and other times they are quite significant.

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On the surface psychic abilities such as soul retrievals, channeling, astral travel, remote viewing, and manifestation appear to be different skills. But they are actually facets of the same basic premise—extending your awareness beyond your physical body and consciously attracting to yourself the experience you desire. The ability to do this, or to exercise any other psychic skill, depends upon a few essential fundamentals. The three most basic are:

1. belief that it is possible
2. deliberate intention
3. receptivity to accept the experience into your life

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After posting about my soul retrieval of a past life in China I took the opportunity to have a follow up conversation with Li Chen, my personality in that life. Here is a brief excerpt from that conversation. A much extended version follows if you click through to follow the story.

"The most you can do is to live and speak your truth and be an example that other may choose to follow. But you must do so because you are motivated to live your own truth joyously and purposefully and not because of how you think you will be perceived by others. It is the same “sin” to alter your thinking and behavior to set a positive example for others as it is to alter your behavior so that others will think better of you. Both are acts of giving away your own power. Don’t do it. Just live your life as authentically as you can. Live for fun and joy and trust your skills to navigate life’s events. As you do that, others may be attracted to your lifestyle and may choose to listen to you. Or they may not. Once you detach yourself from their reactions you detach yourself from a desire for their energy. Thus free, you can devote even more attention to drawing power from your own Source within."

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Thought is an idea held by consciousness.

Belief is well-practiced thought.

Truth is a long-or widely-held belief.

At each stage in this progression the idea gains acceptance. Yet its impact upon reality is determined not by its supposed veracity but rather by the energy invested in it. There is no right or wrong in the universe, thus there is no single truth. Rather there is a preference for ideas or dislike for ideas. It is by experiencing this contrast that you make choices. And it is through your choices that you create your reality, which necessarily always represents what is true for you.

The last category of soul retrieval work I do involves past life reintegration. That is, revisiting, reliving, and reintegrating experiences from other lifetimes that I (or a client) have experienced. This work combines aspects of splintered self recovery and soul rescue, which makes sense if you consider previous lives as splintered aspects from your Higher Self or Over Soul.

Just as an aspect of your personality can splinter and remain stuck at a point of trauma in your current life, so too can aspects of personalities from previous lives. As unintegrated parts of your Higher Self they can cause fears, challenges, or difficulties in your present life. This forms the basis for the Hindu belief of karma – an energetic imbalance from one lifetime that is balanced in another lifetime.

Sometimes karmic imbalances are minor and sometimes they are extremely challenging. As I write this, I am personally working to integrate a past life issue from China in the 16^th century in which I tried and generally failed to teach people about alternate realities and humanity’s capacity for direct contact with the Divine. As you can imagine, the ideas were ahead of their time. At best people regarded them with amusement. At worst they dismissed them or countered them with confrontation and anger.

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The second kind of soul retrieval involves ghosts. Yes. Ghosts. They do exist, and I interact with them periodically.

Don’t worry. They’re nothing like the horror movie or bed sheet on Halloween varieties. Rather, they’re a lot like the people you know and love, because sometimes they are. The point is, when we die our spirits separate from our bodies and continue on as the distinct personalities we consider to be ourselves.

Sometimes this process goes very smoothly, and people who die transition right on to a state of consciousness where they find previously departed loved ones, healing from the psychological wounds of the last lifetime, opportunity for reviewing that lifetime to learn from it, and guidance about what choices to make for future learning opportunities.

Other times things don’t go so smoothly and they get stuck. If that happens I find it is generally caused by one of five factors.

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When I do soul retrieval work on living people it involves a process of retrieving lost aspects of the person that have been fragmented from the soul or energy body due to a physical or emotional trauma.

Clinical psychologists describe a similar process called dissociation and reintegration, wherein certain aspects of a person’s memory or personality splinter from the whole. These parts can be reintegrated through talk therapy or they can be reintegrated at the spiritual level. Both are effective, but sometimes working at the spiritual level can affect change in shorter order.

For example, when I was five years old my father sat me down on the staircase in our house and told me he was moving out because he and my mother were getting a divorce. From the moment I heard that fateful news some part of my awareness remained stuck there on the staircase even though the rest of me moved on. That moment changed my life, and it caused a host of positive and negative beliefs about myself, some of which I carry with me to this day.

Over the ensuing decades I worked through a good deal of these issues on my own, but certain ones kept reappearing over and over in my life. I finally broke that pattern when I worked with my friend Deb to do a partnered soul retrieval.

Initially we were simply looking at a problematic issue concerning a series of jobs I’d held over the years. We both entered an altered state of consciousness and considered the situation. Deb quickly realized that the pattern stemmed from long held beliefs about myself that started when I was four or five years old.

This led us to the incident on the stairs when I learned the fateful news about my parents. We journeyed across time and space to that point and began a sequence of events that helped my splintered self to release its trauma and return to the whole for reintegration. (You can read more about this specific retrieval in Soul Retrieval – Splintered Self Reintegration.)

Through this process of retrieval and integration I achieved a level of immediate healing that had eluded me for more than 30 years. To be sure it could have happened in traditional psychotherapy, but instead a single retrieval session helped me release old issues and establish a new more positive pattern of thinking.

Soul retrievals are a shamanic practice of escorting souls, or aspects of someone’s soul, to a more appropriate location in nonphysical reality. Soul retrievals can be done to help living people or to help those who have died (transitioned beyond the physical realm). Both are facets of the same thing. The first helps reintegrate “lost” aspects of a person’s personality. The second helps to reintegrate entire personalities or past lives into a person’s Higher Self.

A successful soul retrieval must have two key elements. First it must identify and release the trauma that caused the separation. Second it must effectively integrate the retrieved soul into the larger soul. Bringing home a lost aspect of the soul is like any homecoming. The process must be welcoming and hospitable or the prodigal soul may want to leave again.

Because the practice of soul retrieval literally dates back to prehistoric times there are countless ways to go about it. Soul retrievals can be done for you by someone else. You can do them yourself. Or you can do them in partnership with someone else. They can be done in person, by telephone, or remotely with no live personal contact.

Traditional shaman use rituals that involve drumming, rattles, totem spirit animals as assistants, and the sacred act of blowing the soul back into the person. You can check out Sandra Ingerman or Michael Harner for more information.

While I greatly respect their work and have read much on the subject I’ve never been formally instructed in traditional shamanic techniques. Consequently, I prefer to work on a modern freelance basis, trusting my training from the Monroe Institute, past experience, and inner guidance regarding the most appropriate procedures for a particular circumstance.

To help you better understand soul retrievals, in the next three posts I’ll describe the types of soul retrieval work I do: splintered-self recoveries, soul rescues, and past life integration.